Anyone else notice that the more the technology moves forward in some ways - the more, from an HCI perspective, interactions and direct manipulation are bringing devices more into line with the ways humans were built to see and interact with the world for the last -- well -- since we could walk upright.
In the beginning - we had a viewport, also called our field of vision. To "Select," we would raise arm arms and "Point" at an object in our field of view and "Grunt," which is just like clicking, in that it informed the other human's around us that we had "Selected," one object out of many. Pointing and clicking was always a least-bad but at least it works mechanism for sending instructions to a machine. It was/is a weak metaphor 2 orders of abstraction removed from the user's intent, but when Englebart created the mouse and invented point-click - he was solving a particular cs problem but from an engineer's perspective. Issues of human-centeredness or affordance never entered the equation so it's interesting that the more interaction technology moves 'forward' the more it's actually reverting to the human cognition works. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://gamma.ixda.org/discuss?post=21621 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
